More than 500,000 people said they couldn’t access Facebook at around 10.30am in New York, according to Downdetector, which monitors Internet and telecommunications disruptions. — AP
Meta Platforms Inc said it has resolved the technical issues that disrupted service for hundreds of thousands of people across its family of social media apps on March 5, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Issues were also reported on other social media sites including YouTube and X.
More than 500,000 people said they couldn’t access Facebook at around 10.30am in New York, according to Downdetector, which monitors Internet and telecommunications disruptions. The number dropped to about 200,000 about 30 minutes later. There were more than 73,000 reports about Instagram at its peak and a smaller number of complaints about WhatsApp and Threads.
The outage extended to some of Meta’s business tools, such as its Ads Manager, the Meta Admin Center and Facebook & Instagram Shops. Even Workplace, Meta’s internal version of Facebook for employees, was disrupted, according to two people familiar with the matter.
By about noon, Meta said it had resolved the issue “for everyone who was impacted”.
YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet Inc, had more than 3,000 reports that service was down at around 10.30am but that number quickly declined. Google said it’s working on a fix for the reported loading issues with YouTube.
Many people took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to complain about outages with Meta sites, including X’s owner Elon Musk. X had a small number of reported disruptions – almost 1,000 as of 11:00 a.m. That number was fewer than 250 by 11.45am.
Theories began to swirl around the Internet about bad actors intentionally disrupting major social media sites on a big voting day in the US, known as Super Tuesday.
Biden administration officials said they hadn’t seen specific or credible threats attempting to disrupt presidential primary voting, but were monitoring the outages.
“We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity,” said a spokesperson for the National Security Council. – Bloomberg
